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How do we transform our experience with chocolate from a hobby to a business without losing the fun, collaborative, part-time nature of it all?

Honestly, this is a very difficult question and we don’t assume that there is an answer. This question goes much deeper than the surface question of how to start a business – it asks how we want to spend our free time, how we want to spend our working hours, how much financial risk we are willing to take on, how confident we are that our chocolate is actually any good, if chocolate bars are our ultimate product, what the future of our family looks like, and how permanent we are in our current living location.

Let’s take a look at the different business model options for starting a bean-to-bar chocolate business (at least to our knowledge in California):

Cottage Food Operator (CFO)

In another post, we went into some detail about this business model. The basic idea is that this business model allows the food maker to prepare food in a private home and sell by delivery or pick-up. We don’t know of a chocolate-maker who has successfully done this.

Pros

We could set this up in our kitchen with limited financial input

We could work on chocolate at any hour of the day, in our pajamas if we want

Cons

We would have to deliver the product to our customers, since shipping is not permitted

Most famers’ markets do not allow CFOs, which would limit our distribution

Sales are restricted to our county, which is quite small and limits our growth potential significantly

Licensing is by county, so if we moved to another county, we would be required to start the process over

It would be very difficult (nearly impossible) for us to be profitable due to these limitations

We could not import (or store) large quantities of beans in our apartment

Private Wholesale Commercial Kitchen

This business model constitutes a private space in a commercial zone rented and outfitted as a legal commercial kitchen. With the wholesale model, the assumption is that there will not be customers purchasing products directly from the physical site. Instead, the product will be sold either online or through a third party distributor. This is what our friends at Arete have at the moment.

Pros

We would have full access to the space

Once we pay for the outfitting of the space, our cost of operation would decrease significantly

This provides the highest potential for growth

We could import beans and store them here

Cons

It is difficult to find a space small enough to be practical for small-batch chocolate-maker use

These types of spaces are few and far between, can be very expensive to rent, and are almost always very expensive to outfit

This is very location-dependent and would require the decision to permanently be located somewhere

Private Retail Commercial Space

This business model constitutes a private space in a commercial zone rented and outfitted as a legal commercial kitchen, like the wholesale space described above. Products could still be sold online and through other distributors. In addition, this model makes it possible for customers to come purchase products on site, like Dandelion’s Valencia Cafe.

Pros

We would have full access to the space

This can be incredibly lucrative, depending on the location, marketing, local foot traffic, and many other factors

We could import beans and store them here

Cons

It is a huge investment to build out a retail space

There are a lot more requirements, such as ADA bathrooms, to consider

This is very location-dependent and would require the decision to permanently be located somewhere

We would need to either quit our jobs or hire staff to physically run the store

Shared Commercial Kitchen

This model involves renting shared commercial kitchen space, typically by the hour or with a monthly membership fee. An example of this is KitchenTown, located in neighboring town, San Mateo.

Pros

This provides the lowest up-front cost of making chocolate commercially

The commercial kitchen has legal documentation and gear for producing and selling food

As we’ve mentioned, Richard and I spent MLK Jr. weekend in LA. During our trip, we had the opportunity to explore Guelaguetza and to visit our friends, Corey and David of Letterpress Chocolate.

We could smell that amazing brownie-like scent as we walked up the stairs to their apartment and as soon as they opened the door, the whirling of multiple Premier Wonder Grinders provided a pleasant white noise background. As usual, they were in the middle of making chocolate!

We first met David at a Yellow Seed gathering last summer and besides some great phone conversations, we met Corey in person during the FCIA weekend just recently. It was great to see them in their element, surrounded by beans, bars, and equipment! Like us and like David and Leslie of Arete (who we also visited in their space last year), they are a husband and wife team of chocolate-makers with different skill sets but a similar goal – to make amazing chocolate.

We learned a few useful lessons to note and had fun with what may seem silly, but is very typical for chocolate-makers: a bean tasting quiz/lesson.

Let’s start with our most useful lesson – documentation. When we walked in, David and Corey were in the middle of a roast (hence the amazing brownie-like smell), so we chatted while they finished the roast with precision. They pulled beans out of the oven every ten minutes and tasted them, jotting down flavor and texture notes religiously into a notebook. This level of detail hasn’t been our strong suite so far. In fact, we’ve kept great notes on our white board or in our blog posts, but we do not have a scientific tracking system yet. We now realize the importance of such detail for the ability to repeat a particular bar’s flavor and in order to really lean from our work. Dave Huston has an incredible documentation system which we hope to learn from as well!

For our bean tasting quiz/lesson, David pulled out sample after sample of raw beans, testing our tastebuds and informing us of the complex and detailed history of each set of beans. This is one of Richard’s favorite things to do, though I’m still learning to love the bitter, chewy nature of raw beans. David and Corey are far more experienced with cocoa beans than most chocolate-makers we know. They spend a lot of time in the producing countries, particularly Guatemala where they own cacao farm acreage. Some of my favorite beans were Oko Caribe from the Dominican Republic and Coto Brus from Costa Rica, Heirloom Cacao Preservation #6.

cocoa bean tasting quiz

We also discussed an exciting new development. Richard and I will be taking a trip to Hawaii next month, partially for his big birthday and partially for chocolate research! Having spent a lot of time with his mentor, Dr. Nat of Madre Chocolate, David had a lot of great advice. We’re excited to visit and look forward to reporting back!

Thank you, David and Corey, for inviting us into your space and for teaching us about your wonderful chocolate-making practices! We look forward to more adventures in the future!

Last weekend, Richard and I took a wonderful trip down to LA. And like we usually do, we incorporated chocolate into the trip in a variety of ways. First of all, we brought chocolate to share with our friends and family. (Everyone’s favorite was the Venezuela from John Nanci’s beans!)

One of the other ways we incorporated chocolate into our trip was by visiting local phenomenon, Guelaguetza Restaurante. This is the most authentically Oaxacan spot I’ve experienced since spending a summer in Oaxaca, Mexico itself. They serve tlayudas, mole, and mezcal, among other southern Mexican delicacies.

Guelaguetza or Fiesta de los Lunes del Cerro, is the name of an annual festival celebrating the diversity of communities and cultures in the state of Oaxaca. You can read more about it here, here, and aquí. When I lived in Oaxaca in 2005, I actually was able to attend the celebrations with my parents and my friend, Medina. It was a spectacular show of dancing and ceremony. Here’s what one of the colorful dances looked like on stage:

Guelaguetza

When Richard and I visited Guelaguetza, the restaurant in LA, it looked a little different, but the colors, the sounds, and the smells were very similar. Most of the restaurant guests were speaking in Spanish and we heard a lively rendition of “Felix Cumpleaños” as we walked in. The decor has a bright and traditionally Oaxacan look, with an open view of the tortillas being made in the kitchen and shelves full of Oaxacan treats, pottery, and utensils for sale.

And of course, we spotted the chocolate!

Mexican chocolate and molinillo

They sell a variety of products, but we came for the chocolate (and the delicious hot atole). When we later shared the chocolate with our chocolate-making friends, the taste brought back one of my favorite chocolate memories. It looks like a hockey puck and requires a knife to break it into pieces. The texture is very grainy, though in a way that’s different from Taza’s texture. Taza seems to include chunks of cocoa nibs, while the largest particle size of this chocolate came in the form of sugar. We crunched on the sugar crystals with each bite. And the flavor includes strong notes of cinnamon, nuts, and other spices, as some of these ingredients are actually ground down with the nibs and included in the chocolate.

Though it isn’t what we’d call “modern chocolate,” it is a delicious and memory-inducing version of Mexican chocolate that I love returning to.

What’s your guilty pleasure in the chocolate world? Maybe it isn’t the highest quality single origin bean-to-bar maker’s award-winning bar. Maybe it’s something you sneak on the side when no one’s looking!

When I was in college, one of my closest friends told me that she only liked chocolate that was 80% or higher. I didn’t understand the concept at the time and was still a predominantly milk chocolate eater. I’ve since learned significantly more about the meaning of percentages and the virtues of dark chocolate.

Our chocolate creations have ranged from 70% to, at the highest, 85%. Well, we’ve tasted the ridiculously dark 100% bar from Dandelion and Endorfin’s 98% bar (2% vanilla). Personally, I think such high percentages taste more muddy than chocolatey. But, Richard is a huge fan. And more importantly, our neighbor, Jude, has personally requested a low-sugar bar to mimic the high percentage, bitter chocolate she knows and loves from her hometown of Barcelona. And given her current pregnancy and her self-proclaimed (and incredible) heightened taste buds, we’re excited to comply!

So, we set out to make a truly dark chocolate. We know it’s important to consider the cocoa butter content of our beans. And we have not measured the exact percentage of our Madagascar beans, but we’ll assume 50% for now. They seem pretty oily and our 85% was successful (though quite strong) when we tried previously.

We started, as usual, by measuring our initial cocoa bean batch (after sorting, before roasting). It came in at 1128 grams. We roasted in our beautiful Behmor, indicating 1 pound on the P2 program minus 2 minutes (as recommended by John Nanci). We took the beans (and nibs) through 4 passes of our homemade winnower, reducing the mass to 943 grams on the first pass (when we noticed lots of big shells), followed by 836 grams on the second pass (when we noticed that the nibs and shells had a lot of static energy), followed by 756 grams on the third pass (when it looked pretty good despite a few shells), followed by 722 grams on the fourth pass, which we deemed finished enough. In other words, we had a 64% yield on winnowing. Richard is still working hard on improving our winnowing process and tools!

We took some advice from the Industrial Chocolate Manufacture and Use book and immediately winnowed the beans, rather than waiting for them to cool. Then we tried a new step in our process: we put the nibs through a quick pre-grind in our new Vitamix 5200 Series Blender, when it turned the discrete nibs into smaller chunks with a slightly oily finish. We heated the stone wheels and reheated the beans, then started the melanger with the 722 grams of nib mush and 100 grams of sugar.

This resulted in an 87.5% dark chocolate with no added cocoa butter. We let it conche and refine for 24 hours, then tried the Chocolate Alchemist’s suggestion for tempering. We poured about a third of the chocolate onto plastic wrap and let it cool slowly in the oven, while the melanger continued conching. This created an effective “seed” chocolate. About an hour or so later, the seed had cooled, and we introduced it back into the warm liquor (at that point around 99 degrees). As the chocolate chunks mixed with the liquid, the temperature dropped significantly, and when we turned off the Premier Wonder Grinder, the temperature of the chocolate had just hit 90. We quickly doled it out into molds with our quick refrigerator pass to complete the tempering process.

While we did not attend any of the official events this weekend, we were present at two more intimate gatherings of chocolate makers. We feel very fortunate to be friends of Dandelion and were able to attend both an informal chocolate-makers’ meet-up on Friday night, hosted at Four Barrel Coffee, and the post-FCIA brunch Sunday morning.

At the Friday night event, I arrived a little late, but in plenty of time to hear some great tidbits from the experts. It was packed with people sitting high on bags of coffee, on the floor, and anywhere there was space. When someone asked how to work with cocoa farmers, I was excited to hear some of the panelists expand on my favorite topic! Greg from Dandelion talked about wanting the farmers to be as excited about their product as he is, and expecting to not just buy something but to also build something together. Jesse, sourcer of Cacao Vivo talked about the importance of transparency, direct trade, and feedback. In the meantime, Hugo Hermelink, a cocoa farmer from Costa Rica, spoke up about the financial troubles of running a cacao operation. I met many of the Dandelion staff members, people from Raaka, indi, and Videri, among others.

It was such an adventure to learn from these experts and hear suggestions for our own chocolate activities. We’re looking forward to trying a few new experiments in the near future. Keep an eye out for more fun in the world of Root Chocolate!

Welcome to my new favorite 100 square feet in San Francisco, besides maybe Dandelion’s cafe with a cup of Mission hot chocolate… Chocolate Covered. Thanks, Dave Huston, for the recommendation!

This tiny hole in the wall in the Castro/Mission is packed to the gills with chocolate and reminds me of a more crowded, cozy, and even more extensive Cacao in Portland. Jack, the owner, introduced himself and let me know that he’s been selling bean to bar chocolate since the concept began over 18 years ago! He used to sell every bean to bar chocolate available, but he told me that now there are too many for him to fit into his tiny store. We chatted about homemade chocolate, where we buy our beans, the upcoming FCIA event and Good Food Awards, and the additional activities put on by Dandelion that week.

As Clay Gordon informed me way back when, people in the chocolate industry are awesome. It’s impossible to be a grouch when surrounded by so much deliciousness!

As I walked around the store, I spotted all the big names in small batch chocolate, and more that I had never seen before. I picked up a couple Marou bars and some Askinosie bars and promised to come back another time. Oh yes, we will be back!

Over the break, we had the incredible opportunity to gather with a group of Bay Area chocolate makers for the first of, we hope, many occasions to get together and share our ideas.

We were delighted to have a group of nine other chocolate makers, in addition to ourselves, gather at Dandelion Chocolate one afternoon in December. Though Richard and I had set out an agenda for the gathering, we quickly realized that the highest priority would be getting to know each other. After a brief meet and greet, Pearl of Dandelion, graciously gave us a tour of the space, including the bean room, the kitchen, and the cafe. Most of the makers present have much smaller operations than Dandelion, so it was a treat to walk through the process that we all know and love, though on a bigger scale.

chocolate-makers’ meet up at Dandelion

Then, we each explained whatever chocolate we had brought along with us, and conducted a tasting of a whole line-up of delicious bars.

chocolate tasting

The group has a wide range of experience and expertise, so the best part of the afternoon’s activity was simply learning about each makers’ work and focus. In particular, we learned about the techniques linked to neuroscience and sensory experience of Endorfin Chocolat from Brian Wallace. We discovered the unique business model of Cocoa Logos by Brent, sending messages through chocolate. We listened to the precise and scientific methods utilized by Leslie and David Senk of Arete, whose dedication to creating the best chocolate bar is surely starting to pay off! (It was great to see them again, after our visit last year). We tried the chain of different roasts on the same bean by Kane, who told us he was inspired by the advice that Tad Van Leer provided in this post. We shared business plan ideas with Dave of Sacramento. We met Zeina, who encouraged us to visit The Chocolate Garage again, and get to know the bars from up and coming makers available there. And we connected with Jay of Origence, who gave us new ideas about collaborating with other makers to import beans.

I hope you all had as relaxing and enjoyable of a break as we did. We spent some quality time on the east coast with family, then a lovely week dog-sitting on the Peninsula.

And now that we’ve given away all our Christmas gifts, I can write about them here!

This year, we gave homemade gifts of… you guessed it… chocolate! And to tailor the chocolate to each of our family members, we adjusted the percentage and tried for the first time (successfully), flavors and inclusions. Inspired by Patric’s Red Coconut Curry bar and Cocanú’s Romulus Remus, among others, we broke into this unknown territory! We used flavor oils from Chocolately and spices from local ethnic grocery stores. It was quite an adventure in flavor!

Two caveats: up to this point, we’ve been very strict about sticking with the basic ingredients in order to stay true to our name: Root Chocolate. However, 1) these were gifts and really fun to play around with, and 2) we’re still discovering/defining our real niche and aren’t ready to limit ourselves to what our name implies. We’ll see where chocolate takes us!

Here’s a rundown of this season’s chocolate gifts:

Hot & Spicy: 80% Madagascar with Kashmiri spices

Smoky: 80% Madagascar with smoked paprika and hot chili pepper oil

Orange: 70% Madagascar with orange oil

Mint: 70% Madagascar with creme de menthe oil

Indian: 70% Madagascar with Garam Masala

Nutty: 70% Madagascar with crumbled pecans

We also, for the first time, used small molds of about 5 grams each, and wrapped the baby chocolates in foil. They look very professional, if I do say so myself!

Christmas chocolates

In my humble opinion, the orange was the best. We learned that just a single drop of orange oil is enough for many many grams of chocolate. Similarly, the creme de menthe is particularly powerful!

According to our family members, the Garam Masala was a huge hit – both unusual and delicious. We’ll have to fine tune that one for future use!

What flavors do you suggest infusing into chocolate? What were your favorite tasty Christmas treats?